Native Out-Migration and Neighborhood Immigration in New Destinations

Abstract

Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics linked to three decades of census data on immigrant settlement patterns, this study examines how the migration behaviors of native-born whites and blacks are related to local immigrant concentrations, and how this relationship varies across traditional and nontraditional metropolitan gateways. Our results indicate that regardless of gateway type, the likelihood of neighborhood out-migration among natives increases as the local immigrant population grows—an association that is not explained by sociodemographic characteristics of householders or by features of the neighborhoods and metropolitan areas in which they reside. Most importantly, we find that this tendency to move away from immigrants is pronounced for natives living in metropolitan areas that are developing into a major gateway—that is, a community that has experienced rapid recent growth in foreign-born populations. We also demonstrate that among mobile natives, the neighborhoods that they move to have substantially smaller immigrant concentrations than the ones they left, a finding that is especially evident in new gateway areas.

Keywords

Immigration Segregation Mobility New destinations

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13524-014-0350-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Notes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Sam Friedman, Jacob Hibel, John Iceland, Bob Kaestner, Maria Krysan, Barry Lee, Dan Lichter, Giovanni Peri, Emily Rosenbaum, Jeff Timberlake, and Stew Tolnay for comments on earlier versions of this article and to Brian Stults for generous support with the Longitudinal Tract Data Base. This research was supported by infrastructure grants to the Cornell University Cornell Population Center (R24 HD058488) and to the University of Washington Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (R24 HD042828) by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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